Twatter Genius Rediscovers that Infantry Mobility is Actually Good

A few days ago I wrote one of my latest Fighter Plane PSA articles on UAV’s, also known as drones. In summary, UAV’s are pretty much worthless in a real war, because the satellites they operate from can potentially be destroyed, the signals can be jammed, and frankly they’re terrible anyway. Their only use is in doing surveillance of already found entities, such as buildings or construction sites. They are absolutely useless for finding anything, because in order to zoom in far enough to see anything in detail, they have to sacrifice the field of view so badly they are only looking at a tiny area.

I covered the area/detail tradeoff in the first piece where I covered spy satellites and their limitations. But that’s not really relevant today, because today we’re dealing with the twatter genius who started this whole distraction with the whole “UAV’s are unstoppable,” bullshit. You see, UAV’s are just beyond amazing, but there’s this One Weird Trick to overcoming them.

I feel like I need to print this out.

So if you can’t afford drones you’re screwed, right? Well, maybe not. Insurgents have mitigated drones through use of motorcycles. In the Sahel, resource poor terrorists conduct mass attacks with motorcycles. Drone-rich French forces have totally failed in stopping them.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother with these types of people. The reason why the “drone-rich French forces,” and their UAVs “totally failed,” is because UAVs are absolute garbage.

 

In a battlefield where the enemy can always see you and fire on you, there are two ways to counter this: speed and stealth. On these two points motorcycle infantry are incredible, especially compared to troops in humvees or pickup trucks.

No, drones can’t “always see you and fire on you.” There are 510 million km^2 on this planet. Drones have to zoom in so far that they can see little more area than a single vehicle. Let’s actually do the math here, because I want to quantify just how absurd this all is.

Here’s some drone footage the US military released of them attacking a Syrian T-72 tank. Notice both how terrible the video quality is, as well as how tiny of an area we are looking at.

Here’s a still from another video the US military released of a UAV strike. You will once again notice that you can’t see much of anything, both in terms of area and detail. But even if the video was compression free, and super high resolution, you would still not be able to see much of anything at all.

 

Let’s say that we’re looking at a 10mx10m area in both shots. Actually let’s be even more generous. Let’s say that we’re looking at a 100x100m area. That’s a whopping… 0.01 km^2. So we’re looking at precisely one fifty-billionth of the entire world’s area.

But you might say that I’m being unfair, since we don’t need to look in random parts of the globe. You’re right, so let’s narrow this down to just the Sahel, the area the Motorcycle Supersoldiers are operating in.

Wikipedia:

Area: 3,053,200 km²

Great, so our single drone can, with a very optimistic estimation, give us a view of… one three hundred millionth the entire area. Fantastic.

Now you might be saying that I’m still being unfair. After all, we’re not concerned with the entire area, right? Well that’s debatable, but let’s narrow this down to just the conflict areas.

Great, so what is that, like, half a million square kilometers? Let’s even say 100 thousand km^2. Using the most optimistic estimations our UAV’s can do surveillance on one ten millionth of the conflict area at any moment in time. And as we’ve seen, said surveillance is shitty, low resolution, compressed video. And I was being generous when I gave them an area of 0.01 km^2 that they can survey. Really, we’re looking at 1/10th to 1/100th that area. So more like one billionth the entire conflict zone.

If it seems like I’m rehashing old content, maybe I am, but I want to get it through to everyone that:

Drones. Are. Fucking. Jokes.

They are shitty little planes with shitty little cameras attached. Their sole purpose is to pretend to be “high tech,” thus “justifying,” pricetags that are utterly detached from manufacturing costs. They exist purely to enrich the MIC. Even the secondary goal, of not having anyone die in them, is irrelevant in a serious war where we are limited by fuel. So to revisit his statement.

In a battlefield where the enemy can always see you and fire on you –

No. They can’t always see you. Not even close. High altitude aircraft, as well as spy satellites, do not exist to find things. They exist purely to do surveillance on things such as buildings, that have already been found. That is the only borderline legitimate purpose that they have.

Anyway, he continues explaining the radical concept of infantry mobility.

In the first article I wrote on this guy I had this annoying feeling, where he’s saying something that’s wrong, but not in the way he thinks it’s wrong. UAVs are entirely irrelevant. They can’t find anything, so you don’t need to bother doing anything about them. Low altitude manned recon planes, especially armed with guns themselves, would be very dangerous. However, the “French forces,” by which I think he means “French-backed forces,” don’t have any of those, which is probably why they’re getting crushed.

As for what he said dirtbikes, I’m going to have to transcribe it.

With a motorcycle you’re not limited to main roads or grassland like trucks are. You can drive through a dirt path in the forest. Down narrow city streets. Narrow mountain paths. When you do use roads, you can travel faster than a truck.

You can hide bikes in buildings as small as a shack. Heck, hide multiple bikes in a house. You can move unseen underneath the canopy of trees. Throw a camouflage net over the parked bike in open terrain. It’s far harder for a drone to find a bike than a humvee.

While humvees need a gallon of diesel to go just 8 miles, the average motorcycle can travel 35-40 miles per gallon, giving riders more options when the supply lines inevitably start getting shelled.

Everything he says here is true. It is also true for smaller four wheeled vehicles.

There is nothing particularly special about having two wheels versus four, other than that not everybody needs to learn how to ride the bikes. ATV’s, or dirtbikes, allow a force to move quickly, and carry far more equipment per soldier than a single man with his two legs and a backpack.

Here are some soldiers being weighed down by potentially over a hundred pounds of gear. They are not particularly difficult to spot, nor can they move quickly, nor can they move a long ways in a single day, especially when carrying a heavy load.

In contrast, this ULTRA HIGH TECH new vehicle that definitely hasn’t existed for decades can go for as long as you give it gas. In a straight line you’re looking at 1,000 km per day. In difficult terrain, it depends.

And it’s even better, because in some situations you can attach a trailer and then tow hundreds if not thousands of pounds. Yes siree, with this brand spanking new invention, a single man can move hundreds of kilometers in a single day. And if we run out of fuel, we’ve got this other happening new invention.

Yes that’s right it’s called a bicycle. This particular model is an e-bike, with racks for carrying gear, and the electric motor for getting uphills. But you don’t need the e-bike. You can literally just use a bike.

Infantry mobility is one of those things that’s sort of hard to explain to people, but imagine if, instead of typical, boring infantry, we gave our infantry the ability to teleport? That’d be pretty good right? Well that’s essentially what we get when we give our soldiers some tiny vehicles to move around with. 

Which is exactly why militaries already use these things, and have for quite some time. Look, I’ve heard lots of complaints from former US soldiers about the sheer amount of gear they have to carry. It’s entirely possible that they’d be better off with some single person ATV’s. Since it’s hard to make money off of such a small, simple vehicle, it would certainly fit with what we know of the US MIC that they wouldn’t be too interested in them. However, I don’t actually know. I’m just trying to point out that motorcycles aren’t particularly special. These guys just got a hold of a lot of motorcycles.

You can space your forces out. Scatter quickly when artillery comes your way. Use your speed and ability to traverse difficult terrain to outmaneuver enemy forces. Wait for your drones to find an opening in the enemy’s lines and then quickly swarm through in mass.

Or you could be using actual, serious, manned low altitude armed air recon planes that can do that while also coordinating with artillery and laying down 20mm cannon fire along with rockets. Also, what’s this “finding an opening in the enemy’s lines.” I mean in what context is he saying that?

Like, this would kind of make sense if he was talking about maybe attacking a convoy of fuel trucks heading to an airbase or wherever to deliver fuel. In that case, you could use your OV-10’s to find weaknesses in the defense and attack there. But then again, the fact that I have to try to figure out what he means does not inspire me with confidence in this analysis.

What he says here is pretty obviously true. You can’t transfer nearly as much stuff as you can with an APC. Then again, the main infantry weapon is the rifle, and that’s light enough to keep, along with the ammo, on the person of the man firing it. Once again, there is a time and place for everything.

The German style motorcyle plus carrier offers little or even no advantage over just having an ATV. But beyond that, there is another advantage of ATVs that dirtbikes just can’t compete with. You can make them tracked.

 

It’s nearly impossible to get such a light, tracked vehicle stuck in the mud. They even have competitions, or at least festivals for ATV enthusiasts where they do exactly this. I can’t find those now, but I can find this. Good luck getting a dirtbike through this.

This is a Swedish military vehicle, the BV-206, that is essentially a small, off road cargo truck. The Russians have a similar vehicle, albeit at almost 10x the size. Tracks have increased maintenance cost, but they do give amazing off road ability. That the guy telling you drones are amazing didn’t even mention tracked ATVs, or ATVs at all, or even tracked vehicles of any kind, really says all you need to know.

The future battlefield belongs to militarized biker gangs. As counter drone tech develops, quality shoulder mounted anti-air and anti-tank weapons proliferate (making armored vehicles and helicopters a liability), these modern horse archers will be the new way infantry fights.

I feel like not enough people are aware that the US Military lost almost 10,000 aircraft in Vietnam. Apparently though, aircraft nowadays are “not survivable,” or even “a liability,” because of the “proliferation,” of ultra short ranged infantry held anti-air missiles.

Anyone who demands perfect survivability for some aspect of the military is demanding perfection. I can do this “not survivable,” bullshit too. Okay so infantry can be killed by artillery from a distance far in excess of their ability to fight back. I guess infantry are totally obsolete liabilities then. Oh but wait, infantry can go and sneak up and kill artillery crews. I guess it’s the other way around then, and artillery are the obsolete liabilities and our entire military should be infantry.

Oh but wait, infantry can be killed by tanks. I mean the AR-15 can’t do shit to a Leopard, now can it? Infantry are unviable then. Well except for the guys who are carrying anti-tank weapons. Their existence makes tanks unviable liabilities. Oh, wait, actually those guys can be easily killed with guys with assault rifles. I’m confuzzled, we have three units who can each kill each other. I guess that must mean they’re all obsolete and unviable.

The A-10 Warthog has no survivability versus the proliferation of MANPADS. I mean, those have existed since before the first Gulf War, but we’ll just pretend that they’re really great now. Oh but wait, the A-10 has a giant fuckoff cannon on the front of the plane, which shreds infantry. So I guess the infantry are the obsolete ones again.

Hold on, the A-10, and all aircraft, are completely vulnerable to fighter planes. I mean when they get within a certain radius of the fighter plane they just spontaneously combust. I guess that means that fighter planes are the only thing we should be building. Just put them on some aircraft carriers and –

Oh but wait a minute. Attack subs can sink aircraft carriers. I guess that means aircraft carriers are totally obsolete then.

Well at least you can fly the fighter planes on land, from airbases. Then they can fly to –

Oh but no, I guess we’ll just destroy them all with long range missiles while they’re still on the ground. Actually, this is the one part of this rant that’s actually true. If our fighter planes can’t takeoff and land from rough airfields, they’re worthless. Even if we have to go and drop some dumb bombs or paratroopers on these airbases.

“Proliferation,” is this really fucking annoying buzzword pushed by MIC shills. All it ever means is “we’re going to pretend war is totally different for *insertBullshitReason, so we can pretend that existing weapons/vehicles with stellar track records, like the A-10 Warthog, are magically going to spontaneously combust on the modern 18th generation battlefield.

It’s amazing how the “proliferation” of anti-infantry weapons, like artillery, mortars, rifles, machine guns, CAS planes, attack helis, mines, etcetera, did not render infantry “obsolete.” The “proliferation” of anti-air weapons, like SAM sites, MANPADS, AAA, does not render aircraft “obsolete.” The “proliferation” of anti-submarine weapons, does not render submarines obsolete. The fact that one weapon can potentially get a kill on x target does not render such targets “obsolete.” 

Independent:

According to the educated guess of military researcher John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, U.S. forces have expended at least 250,000 small-caliber bullets for every insurgent killed in the present wars. 

The application of overwhelming firepower in lieu of alternative tactics has long been the American way of fighting a war. In World War II, U.S. factories cranked out, along with mountains of other munitions, about 41.4 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition, enough to permit the users to take about ten shots at every man, woman, and child alive on earth at that time. 

Does it take one bullet to kill a soldier, or about 250,000? If we were to use the bullshit kill probabilities that these propagandists use for whichever weapon system they are trying to shill or attack, then it takes just one bullet to kill a soldier. If we are to live in actual reality, we’re looking more at like 100,000.

If you read enough MIC propaganda you’ll come across multiple “new,” weapons that supposedly make X obsolete, forcing us to purchase Y very expensive MIC garbage. And I’m here to tell you that it’s literally never true. I have not come across a single example of “oh my god, X renders Y obsolete,” that was not an example of either demanding absolute perfect survivability, or just straight up bullshit.

You’ll hear this same sort of garbage with “when a fifth generation fighter meets a fourth generation fighter, the latter dies,” and absurdly optimistic estimations of AAM performance in the latest installment of the fighter PSA series. I just want you to know ahead of time that whenever you hear anyone saying anything like this, it can be immediately dismissed without a second thought.

I get where the guy is coming from. He bought into the ridiculous “UAVs are the future,” meme. Then he noticed they utterly failed at stopping a primitive ISIS type army.

Because he believes so strongly in the retarded Military Industrial Complex bullshit about UAVs totally not being garbage, he needs to rationalize their complete and utter failure by hypothesizing how this primitive army managed to defeat a military that had plenty of shitty drones that do nothing. Rather than accept that it’s just because drones suck, he goes off on a long tangent about how dirtbikes are this hip new invention that is totally rewriting the rules of warfare. It can’t just be that those Africans grabbed whatever was laying at hand, and there was probably a dirtbike dealership nearby.

He has apparently never even heard of ATV’s or tracked vehicles of any kind. Moreover, he thinks that dirtbikes aren’t just good for getting places, but should be used for tactical mobility, because what infantry need more than anything else is the ability to shoot while driving, apparently.

The comments on that twitter thread are not much better.

Apparently there’s this little quadcopter that can accelerate from 0-200 kmph in just one second. I think he’s overselling it, but even if true, that’s about 6G of acceleration. Wow, infantry will have no chance against those things. What a fresh new concept, things that move really fast. 

But what if I told you there was this thing that could accelerate a metal object to speeds of around 900 meters per second. Not 200 kmph, but over 3,000 kmph. And it could do this in under one one hundredth of a second.

Stop falling for the drone meme. Stop thinking that something that is new is somehow better than something that is old. Most of the shit you read online about the military is bullshit corporate propaganda passed through a filter of journalist retards who couldn’t even understand it in the first place.